The sanded floor, patterned with a broom, held no carpet, nor were the
walls covered, but white and bare save for a number of small, framed
engravings--a view of Boston Harbour, Queene Anne's Tomb, and some black
line satirical portrait prints. A stone fireplace, ready for lighting,
had iron dogs and fender, and a screen lacquered in flowery wreaths on
a slender black stem. At one side stood a hinge-bound chest, its oak
panels glassy with age; on the other, an English set of drawers held a
mirror stand and scattered trifles--razors and gold sleeve-buttons, a
Barcelona handkerchief, candlesticks and flint, a twist of common,
pig-tail tobacco; while from a drawer knob hung a banian of bright
orange Chinese silk with a dark blue cord.

By the side of his curled black walnut bed, without drapery, and set,
like a French couch, low on three pairs of spiral legs, was a deep
cushioned chair into which he sank and dragged off his sodden buckskin
breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision--squat,
rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with
apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He
secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds,
he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, into an immediate profound
slumber.

The shadows of late afternoon were once more gathering when he woke. He
lay, with hands clasped behind his head, watching a roseate glow
disperse from the room. From without came the faint, clear voice of
Marta Appletofft, across the road at the farm, calling the chickens; and
he could hear the querulous whistling of the partridges that invariably
deserted the fringes of forest to join the domesticated flocks at feed
time. A sense of well-being flooded him; the project of St. Xavier, the